A dessert featuring glogg, a Scandanavian mulled wine, will be featured at an Oct. 22 dinner at Trillium restaurant in Denver’s Ballpark neighborhood. (Courtesy Trillium)

OK, maybe you can’t make it to New York City in November to see Trillium chef Ryan Leinonen cook a dinner at the iconic James Beard House. But you can get a sneak preview of that meal during a six-course dinner he’s hosting Oct. 22 at his Ballpark neighborhood restaurant.

The dinner features six courses with paired wines, starting with an hors d’oeuvres reception. The fun starts at 6:30 p.m. and costs $100 per person. Yes, reservations are required: 303-379-9759 if you’re interested. You can check out the restaurant (2134 Larimer St.) at its website at trilliumdenver.com.

This isn’t Leinonen’s first trip to the Beard House, named after the famed food writer. Ten years ago when he was a sous chef at The Kitchen in Boulder, he made the trip with exec chef Hugo Matheson to Manhattan to help with Matheson’s dinner.

“Cooking at the Beard House is a rare honor, and while I’ve been there before, it’s different this time because I get to defend the art of cooking by preparing my own rendition of Nordic cuisine,” Leinonen says.

New Flood wine that will launch Oct. 15 at fundraiser for Colorado floods.(Provided by Doug Brown)

The floods that devastated Colorado last year inspired three wine professionals in Boulder to create a new wine called Flood, a tribute to the community spirit that manifested between neighbors and strangers working to rebuild their towns and lives. They’ll launch the new wine on Wednesday, Oct. 15, with a wine tasting and silent auction at the Boulder Wine Merchant as a fundraiser for Jamestown, which faces a long rebuilding challenge.

“We’re all cyclists, and we’ve all been in Jamestown many times,” said Matthew Cain, founder of Derailleur Wines, a wine importer and consultancy that works with exclusive wineries in California, France, Spain and Italy. “It was heavily impacted, and still continues to be affected.”

The cyclists, all with long careers in the wine business, decided to combine their different skills to create Flood.

Brett Zimmerman, a master sommelier, has the palate and a retail shop, the Boulder Wine Merchant. Craig Lewis owns Stelvio Selections, a wine distributor in Boulder that relies on a team of experts that include master sommeliers like Bobby Stuckey, Richard Betts, and Matt Zimmerman. And Cain has experience at importing and brand building.

The first bottling, White Label, includes a Chenin Blanc, Chardonnay, and Pinot Noir. All Flood grapes are grown in Santa Barbara, Calif.

In January, Flood will release a second bottling, Black Label, an exclusive Pinot Noir. Made by acclaimed winemaker Sashi Moorman, it draws grapes from four different sites: Bent Rock, Rita’s Crown, Mount Carmel, and Wenzlau. Twenty-five percent of the wine is whole-cluster fermented, with the aging done in older French oak barrels.

For each bottle of wine sold at the wine tasting, $5 will go to Jamestown flood relief, and all of the silent auction proceeds will be sent to the efforts to rebuild the town.

Flood, available now at the Boulder Wine Merchant, will soon be available across the country.

Restauranteurs, Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson and Bobby Stuckey, make a pizza at Pizzeria Locale on Thursday, October 2, 2014. (Colleen O’Connor, The Denver Post)

Working in the newest location of Pizzeria Locale on Thursday, preparing for Sunday opening, restaurateurs Bobby Stuckey and Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson couldn’t stop talking about wheat. Their goal is to make Neapolitan-style pizza the way it was made 150 years ago, and the last remaining obstacle to that was the dough.

“Every time we got to the dough, it was always like, this is the last frontier,” said Mackinnon-Patterson. “We’d unwound all the other ingredients to how pizza really was when it was healthy, hand-crafted, and delicious.”

But the dough was a problem. They wanted to make dough the way it was made before the days of commercial wheat. It took 10 months of experimenting with wheat, along with trips to The Bread Lab at Washington State University, the first public laboratory designed to test and develop products and techniques for the craft baker.

The trio of shops, housed in the same space but holding different hours, will join the other Atomic Cowboy family of restaurants at 3237 E. Colfax Ave and 141 S. Broadway.

Shader says he has worked on the project for three months, but has dreamed of opening in a north Denver neighborhood for far longer.

“I’ve wanted to be up in that area for years,” he says. “We finally found a building that worked and the neighborhood is wonderful.” Atomic Cowboy Tennyson, as the business will be formally known, will occupy the space of the old Ward Carter Dance Studio at 4275 Tennyson St.

“The place has great bones with a big barreled ceiling,” Shader says, who adds that he is in the final stages of securing a liquor license. He plans on having a big bar with more than 50 Colorado and international beers, with 24 on tap. “We hope to open in early spring, but right now I’m just saying ‘spring,'” Shader says.

Oh, and one more thing that will be music to the ears of the Southern-fried set: “We’re working on adding pimento cheese to the biscuit menu,” Shader says.

Liken won the contest with a beef heart tartare served with dandelion greens, plus a Southeast Asian-style shrimp broth that featured raw and thinly sliced beef hear, live spot prawns layered at the bottom of the bowl, mixed with lotus root, crimini mushrooms and dandelion greens.

“The Knife Fight Kitchen was such a high-energy environment,” Liken told The Denver Post. “It was easy to get caught up in all of the shouting and the fast pace- It was so much fun. And then to bring home the win made it that much more memorable.

“I had a great time,” she said. “I really like to win. It’s that simple.”

This isn’t Liken’s first culinary-contest rodeo. She has also appeared on Food Network’s “Iron Chef” and Bravo’s “Top Chef.” Liken, who has run her namesake Contemporary American restaurant at 12 Vail Road for 10 years, was also a James Beard Award nominee for Best Chef Southwest in 2009, 2010 and 2011.

The “Knife Fight” judges were Naomi Pomeroy of Beast in Portland, Ore., Brendan Collins of Waterloo & City, along with show host Ilan Hall.

While he plans to open a noodle shop in the coming months, Osaka is staying sharp with an Oct. 9 guest appearance at one of Beast and Bottle’s “Mutiny at the Bottle” dinners. In fact, it’s the only meal Osaka is cooking in Denver in October.

The “Beast” is in Denver’s Uptown neighborhood, and the dinner costs $75 per person, plus an extra $25 if you decide to pair wines.

It’s a tasty-sounding menu that Osaka will create with Beast chef Paul Reilly and his crew. Check it out:

Squeaky Bean owner Johnny Ballen is a huge fan of Bill Murray, and on Sept. 21 he’ll mark the comedian’s 64th birthday on the planet with a Sunday brunch bingo bash at the restaurant, which sits in LoDo at 1500 Wynkoop St.

Ballen and Murray have something of a history. In 2012, the star of “Ghostbusters,” “Caddyshack” and “Lost in Translation” — among others — showed up at Ballen’s restaurant for a tour following a Colorado Rockies game, where the actor was spotted wearing a Squeaky Bean T-shirt, a gift from Ballen.

Ballen was thrilled. “Bill Murray has made me laugh ever since he was a cast member on Saturday Night Live, and I just love the guy, his movies and all the characters he’s played,” he says. “So we’re making this Sunday’s bingo brunch all about Bill Murray’s birthday.”

Murray actually has a Denver connection. The Chicago native briefly attended school at Regis University here, before dropping out and returning to Chicago to pursue an entertainment career.

All the dishes on chef Theo Adley’s brunch menu will name-check Murray’s films and characters — can’t wait to see what the Carl Spackler dish will be — such as cocktails like Bloody Murrays and Murray-mosas.

The fun starts at 10 a.m. The bingo brunch proper goes off at 1 p.m., with prizes such as Murray DVDs and T-shirts. Brunch ends at 3 p.m.

The Harry & David food truck is making the rounds in Denver. (Courtesy Harry & David)

Harry and David, the Oregon-based gourmet gift outlet, launches its Loveland store on Sept. 19 — hey, that’s today — but if you can’t make it up to the Promenade Shops at 5865 Sky Pond Drive, there’s good news: The Harry & David food truck will make the rounds in Denver, with stops in Fort Collins and Loveland over the Sept. 20-21 weekend.

Tim Keller, the company’s executive chef, is manning the truck and giving out free treats. It sounds like a tasty lineup: blue cheese and Royal Riviera pears, brie with peach and pepper jelly, roast beef sandwich bites, and peanut-butter chocolate s’mores.

The company’s food truck — a.k.a. the Epicurean Express — will also serve wines from the store’s collection as it makes its rounds.

Here’s the schedule for today in Denver. (The truck visits Fort Collins on Sept. 20 and Loveland on Sept. 21.)

The kale-and-apple salad was one of the dishes that landed Denver’s Acorn restaurant a spot on OpenTable’s dining awards list. (The Denver Post, Cyrus McCrimmon)

Five Colorado restaurants, including Acorn in Denver and Black Cat in Boulder, have won OpenTable’s Diners Choice Awards.

The awards honor the Top 100 Fit for Foodies Restaurants in America, with the list generated from more than 5 million restaurant reviews collected from verified OpenTable diners between Sept. 1, 2013, and Aug. 31. Click here for the full list.

The criteria, according to OpenTable, the restaurant reservation site, was restaurants that boasted “unique menus, easygoing ambience, and passionate chefs who have a ‘source local, cook global’ approach.”

The three other Colorado restaurants making the cut were Bistro C.V. and Laundry in Steamboat Springs, and Django’s Restaurant and Wine Bar in Crested Butte.

Chef Matt Selby concocted a five-course meal to celebrate the end of Colorado’s peach season, each dish featuring the fruit somewhere within. The dinner begins, however, with a tasting of bourbon from Garrison Brothers Distillery, out of Hye, Texas.

Distillery co-founder Charlie Garrison will be on-hand to guide the tasting and chat about the Brothers’ history and techniques. A Garrison Brothers cocktail accompanies the amuse bouche course, too.